Hospitality Design - December 2011 - 49

places: new orleans

perspectives
By JoAnn Greco

rolling on the river
The good times are rolling again in New Orleans, as the city embarks on a rash of long overdue hotel upgrades. It’s not that there’s a shortage of rooms in town—they total more than 30,000—but that, surprisingly, the stock has grown tired. The city has coasted on its dated mix of convention behemoths, small French Quarter inns, and luxury offerings since the mid-1980s. The $170 million reemergence of the celebrated Roosevelt Hotel under the Waldorf Astoria ﬂag in 2009, however, signaled that tourism areas of the city had ofﬁcially rebounded from Hurricane Katrina. Since then, the big chains have started upgrading, with Hilton New Orleans Riverside investing $20 million for new carpeting and window treatments in its 1,162 rooms; the Sheraton pumping $45 million into similar refurbishments; and the Marriott freshening its 36,000 square feet of meeting space.

From top: Wall graphics define a rendering of the W French Quarter’s proposed guestroom; and 8 Block Kitchen & Bar and the lobby at the Hyatt Regency New Orleans.

Play Ball
Indeed, events pegged to arrive at the Superdome in the near future—the Final Four basketball tournaments in March, and the Super Bowl in 2013—are being credited with driving the citywide rush to reinvent. And, says architect Jack Sawyer of local

Classic Redo
This fall, the unveiling of a substantially reworked Hyatt Regency that had been closed since August 2005 after sustaining heavy damage from Hurricane Katrina trumped everything with a $275 project helmed by Dallas-based Looney & Associates. The design team approached the renovation as if it was a new build, says principal Jim Looney. Public areas were relocated to a new three-story addition—designed by Atlanta-based Hogan Campis Architecture—and the hotel’s entrance has been reoriented to face the French Quarter. Meeting and exhibition spaces were doubled and the 1,193 guestrooms completely overhauled. Design features include nods to the architectural details of the city and a rich palette—think deep chicory accented with burgundy, aubergine, and hints of gold—that eschews Mardi Gras cliches. “This has been a capstone hotel for the city since it opened in the mid-seventies,” Looney says. “It’s a prominent building on the skyline, and its location next to the Superdome has carried not only physical but emotional signiﬁcance in relation to the devastation that New Orleans suffered.”

ﬁrm

Eskey+Dumez+Ripple,

recent

transplants such as himself have also contributed. “After the storm, there was this great inﬂux of young people from elsewhere,” he observes. “Part of it was opportunity, part of it probably had a lot to do with a desire to rebrand things, to bring the city back to life.” Sawyer served as a lead designer for Ste. Marie, a stylish restaurant in a new apartment building designed by the ﬁrm, just two blocks away from the Hyatt. Playing off the area’s industrial heritage, the restaurant sports a motif of wood pallets and a commissioned artwork that recreates a historic Sanborn map of the neighborhood during the late 1800s. Sawyer’s ﬁrm is also the architects for the revamps of the city’s two W hotels. The French Quarter property, one of the brand’s ﬁrst to open, is getting a facelift of its guestrooms and restaurant, courtesy of New York-based Nema Workshop. Highlights include punchier colors and more whimsical touches such as silver circular armoires. Further into the future, the second W, located near the city’s convention center, is slated to be transformed into a Le Meridien, with interior design by Meyer Davis in New York.

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December 2011

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